Hacker News Reader

> but plenty of things the casinos wouldn't like you doing if they knew you were doing it

Most of the time casinos are quite happy for you to attempt whatever system you think you have, card counting or whatever. Most people are bad at it, and even if you're good, you can't actually "flip" the odds as much as nudge them slightly into your favor. You figure out when you're a _little_ more likely to win and increase your bets by an order of magnitude. If you've done it right (and you probably haven't) and the casino hasn't neutralized your advantage by tweaking the game rules, you will still lose those larger bets a good percentage of the time.

Casinos are quite happy to let you do this, because the average joe doesn't even have the bankroll sit through 3 shoes hoping for a chance to 10x his bet. At a $15 minimum bet table, you could lose $500 in a single shoe, no problem. They'll let you count to your little heart's content, and then when your count is finally advantageous, you'll up your bet to $150/hand and that's when they'll shut you down.

Card counting is the thing everyone knows about. A good counter is getting a 1-2% advantage and is under lots of heat. If the table is paying 6:5 on blackjack instead of 3:2 like more are becoming it kills your entire edige. We were doing stuff in the 8-12% range. It is far more advanced than CC and almost never discussed online.

Every casino game has a vulnerability, even slots. Advantage play is not free money, it's a job. You need skills, a bank roll, and to put in a lot of hours in casinos.

>We were doing stuff in the 8-12% range.

If there was a legal way of achieving that kind of edge, casinos would know about it. That kind of gain is incredibly noticeable if you're watching the gambler, which the casino is absolutely doing.

>Every casino game has a vulnerability, even slots.

This is even more alarming. Slots aren't a skill-based game, they're RNG machines with a mean EV that's substantially lower than any other game in the casino. The only possible strategy that I can think of for slots (besides breaking into the machine and changing the RNG) is to hunt down slot machines that award an accumulative jackpot and play them when you calculate that the EV is positive. Even then, this is a rare circumstance and your gains would be small.

Yes, the more creative and rare the exploit the better it pays, and good ones do provide 10%+ advantage.

Good card players have lots of ways to gain advantages.

http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/25107-poker-legend-phil...

Did you read the article? He was sued for using an illegal technique and had his assets seized. Like I said, no legal technique will give you the edge that you're talking about. Also, very few decks will have consistent manufacturer flaws nowadays.

The legality is disputable. They permitted everything he asked for.

Point is, he's the most famous card player in the world playing at the highest stakes at a top tier casino.

There are plenty of low profile players who can do the things Phil knows how to do. Casino's have a hard time distinguishing a lucky run from an advantage player they haven't seen enough times to catch their attention. The last thing they want to do is ban a high roller, so advantage players get the benefit of the doubt.

To make it as an AP you need a big bank roll, a lot of discipline to learn the games, access to a community of APs, and a lot of time for traveling and gambling. It's a job.

Some slots machines may have a poorly designed RNG. For example it may have too little entropy, and its state may be calculated from multiple rounds of watching the symbols it displays.

In one of Kevin Mitnick's books—can't recall which one, maybe The Art Of Deception?—he interviews anonymous hackers about their exploits, and one of the chapters is about a group of 4 people who did just that. They bought used slot machines, reverse-engineered the RNG in the firmware, found it was vulnerable. They exploited it to win a few million dollars over many months/years and many casinos. They spread their winnings over time, and they stopped when they felt it was too risky to get caught by the casinos.

Slots are designed by psychologists to maximize take. One of the things they do is make sure there's a decent payout every 80 spins on average. Also slots in well viewed spots pay out more because they get more attention. There are a number of strategies that are more detailed, such as the one Mitnick mentions.

People do make money playing slots, but it's real work.

Enjoy your fantasy.

Have a look at StevenBridges at YouTube

> you can't actually "flip" the odds as much as nudge them slightly into your favor

Slightly less into your dis-favour?

> It's not the FE that's attractive, it's that they're people who put very little value on social conformity and thus can be honest in a way that "fit ins" can't.

There's a marvelous video [1] that Dan Olsen of Folding Ideas did as a deep dive into the community of Flat Earth and how it manages to survive. The TL;DW (though it really is worth the watch) is that people both want and need community, and all communities have ways of signaling that you belong to them. Sometimes it's language, sometimes it's clothes, sometimes it's behaviors--the "qualifications" vary wildly by group, but in many cases from the outside the exhibited behaviors of a group (e.g., believing in flat earth) don't jive with the rest of the perceived individual (e.g., scientifically literate) until you factor in that the behaviors don't have to matter beyond ensuring membership to a group.

A whole lot of things make a lot more sense to me when seen through that lens, including a lot of organized religion. People just want to belong, and often the "price of entry" is inconsequential vs. the payoff of belonging somewhere.

Thanks for sharing your story. It helps me to understand the "Why" of some of these things, and helps me feel more connected to my fellow beings.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

so it's a cult. where believing in wacky things is a rite you have to accomplish to prove your commitment to the community. the wackier, the stronger is the bond

> so it's a cult

Sure, I'd call flat earth a cult, but I'd say the say of most organized religions too, but I was deliberately avoiding putting OP on the defensive by using labels with such strong connotations. My point was more that this effect is common across ALL human groups--it's the defining factor of what a group IS, and it's useful to remember when people's behavior doesn't otherwise make sense.

I think the same dynamics are true of most political movements, or things like astrology. Yes, by the definition of "saying weird stuff to prove your membership", they all sound like cults, but the point is that in a lot of cases it doesn't matter, and it isn't useful to make inferences about the person behind the statement (e.g. "believes in flat earth" == "totally scientifically illiterate") without also considering the groupthink pressures.

I say that more as a "know thy enemy" kinda thing--so often I've tried arguing with people in these groups and made no progress and came out more confused than when I went in because I was missing the factor that many people don't hold those beliefs tightly, or those who do hold it to access the social benefits, so coming at their position from a purely logical perspective is unlikely to change their minds or epistemology--and that's doubly true if you put them on the defensive by calling them a cultist out of the gate.

Organized religions and groups designated as cults are patently not the same. There are properties inherent to major religions that enable their followers to create socially mature and stable communities, where the members of these communities can attain self-actualization in some manner even if they're not adherents. I am aware of the problems that these major religions have (on a personal level as well), but history provides plenty of evidence in support of the usefulness major religions have provided. People will always feel the need to belong to groups, but all groups and cultures do not produce the same level of social, communal and personal stability, and pretending otherwise is a huge disservice to the giants whose shoulders we stand on and also dangerous narrative for impressionable people. I am not even religious, but memey hot takes like saying major religions are the same as woo woo cults is just wrong.

I empathize deeply with this perspective. The individuals I most cherish interacting with are those who entertain unconventional topics, indulging in initial exploration before forming judgments. With them, I can freely brainstorm and bounce off "out there" ideas. They don't just echo my thoughts, but they also refrain from instantly dismissing concepts deemed controversial. Ideally, they'd subtly express their genuine beliefs, even if skeptical, without overt dismissal.

No I'm not into FE.

I'm not sure about FE, but the "we're spinning right now at 1000mph" disintegrates under any reasonable interrogation.

For example, consider you're looking at a disk shaped cloud 10 miles above that is 20 miles long from the center. If you're on Earth spinning below it at 1000mph you would be looking back at the cloud in less than 2 minutes.

So how do clouds linger above us on a fast spinning earth?

May not be a convincing question for some, but it's made me think.

The cloud is suspended in a fluid that is also spinning. The atmosphere is an ocean we live at the bottom of, and where it makes contact with the earth friction between the fluid and the solid conveys inertia from the solid to the fluid. Inertia is likewise conveyed, by friction, up the viscous column of atmosphere.

It is the same principle by which stirring your coffee causes the entire contents of the cup to swirl, and not just that touched immediately by the surface of the spoon.

OK, so if you take a sphere spinning on its axis and put it in a spherical aquarium I could see it all spinning together.

But what I don't see is how that works in an atmosphere which is mostly near the earth's surface. It seems like you would lose a lot of energy as you entered the stratosphere because the air density increasingly falls, there's less room for friction to cohere the atmosphere.

High clouds should be less effected which would make them appear to move much faster than low clouds.

Is there a good source somewhere on how this works that takes this into account? The stuff I've seen just assumes its own model and works backwards.

The atmosphere is spinning with the Earth. It has to be, otherwise you'd have 1000 mph winds at Earth's surface. How? It gets dragged along by friction with the surface

OK, but how does that account for the fact that the atmosphere thins?

I'm not a physicist but it seems to me that given entropy and the thinning of the atmosphere as elevation increases that clouds would not a) not appear to float in place and b) only move in one direction.

Low clouds would appear to float in place but high clouds would move quickly away from the spin of the earth.

High clouds do move more quickly!

Not sure how someone would go about proving this with household tools

I don't know either, but one fun fact is that you can measure the temperature of reflected moonlight with a $20 laser thermometer.

It's reflecting sunlight right, so why does moonlight register as colder than shaded spots.

It's a real easy and fun experiment.

That one is probably out of my pay grade.

One guess is that the Moon is not a perfect reflector and the photon density per unit area coming off the Moon is a lot lower.

You could test this hypothesis by pointing a laser thermometer at a light bulb and a pile of dirt reflecting the light from the bulb. The Moon is basically made out of gray dirt.

Ground in the shade may have some insulation? You'd think open ground would be warmer at night because it's unshaded, and because the moon is supposed to be reflecting sunlight. The fact that it's colder is counterintuitive.

It would be interesting to try the experiment on a moonless night to check the difference between open and shaded ground. If they are the same the shade doesn't likely matter (given a sufficient time from sundown).

You could do the light bulb dirt test in a room without windows or another light source.

By that logic airbearings wouldn't work because they add friction instead of removing it.

This is what I love about FE people. The desire to question, learn, and understand on a fundamental and intuitive level.

I would love to sit down, have a beer, and try to figure out how the clouds work. Not just what Wikipedia says happens, but really understanding why.

Reminds me of people who build rocket ships in their back yard or nuclear reactors in their garages.

-SE believer

I am sorry to ask, but do you think the astronauts in the ISS are liars? Or that satellite imagery is faked?

Well, if they bothered to fool everybody into thinking earth was a spinning ball a few lies from astronauts and some fake photos isn't really a stretch.

If you look through a telescope you can see other celestial bodies that are spherical, so why would earth be exceptional?

I've also noticed that people rally and gather together around various forms of controversial/bullshit topics. That's what religions, cults, anti-vaxxers, qanon, UFO stuff, moon landing hoax, flat earth, etc all are, and for all their faults they are welcoming towards quirky / non-mainstream people, and they hang out together and network, have events, etc.

Unfortunately, there isn't really an equivalent community / network for spherical earth "believers", atheists, and other such boring, uncontroversial topics. Sometimes it's tempting to feign support for some of these things, just to hook into the community.